


Mirror, Mirror

by DollBones



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Body Image, Borderline Personality Disorder, Eating Disorders, F/M, Mental Illness, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-26 17:53:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6249688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DollBones/pseuds/DollBones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First uploaded fanfic, although not the first that I've written for It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  I thought it'd be interesting to  peek into the slowly eroding narcissistic delusions of Dennis Reynolds now that he's pushing forty in the show.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mirror, Mirror

Dennis Reynolds knew he didn’t have problems.  The rest of the world did.  If he screamed and broke things more often than usual or found himself fixing his mascara several times per day after having cried it off, it was because it was only natural that it would be psychologically wearing for a finely chiseled god such as himself to be surrounded by lesser beings on a constant basis.  The life of an extraordinary man was not supposed to be an easy one.  That’s why so many of those Romantic poets died at an early age, he thought to himself.  They had been simply too pure, too beautiful, too flawless for a flaw-filled world.  

So when he gazed blearily into his twin Dee’s bathroom mirror, let out an ear-piercing shriek, and shattered the glass with his fist, it was a reasonable response to a multitude of external indignities.  The first one, and the most pivotal because it snowballed into the rest, was that Mac had decided to hang out with Charlie the night before, leaving Dennis by himself in the apartment.  He’d gotten ridiculously mad at him for some comment he’d made about his (rightly) stupid decision to wear two colognes that day and had stomped out, leaving Dennis with nothing to do but drink.  Even Dee was out, banging some guy she’d met at the bar, so he couldn’t turn to her like he normally did when Mac abandoned him.  Guzzling beer in one hand and digging through a pint of ice cream with the other, he’d told himself that the emptiness inside him that he was desperately trying to fill wasn’t the twinge of loneliness but the spark of outrage.

Thus, he squandered the strict diet plan he’d laid out for himself for that day in one sitting, guaranteeing that he would look bloated and gross the following day.  True, Dennis conceded, his stomach had been torn apart by hunger pangs all day from having foregone lunch, so the ice cream sitting in the freezer had looked to him like an oasis would to a man dying in the desert.  But, he reminded himself, it was dumbass stupid Mac’s fault--“Mac’s fault, Mac’s fault,” he’d hissed over and over to himself, ruefully scraping the sides of the ice cream container with his spoon for the last traces of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia--that he ended up gorging himself because his friend  hadn’t been there to distract him from his hunger.  

As a consequence of bingeing on food and drink, Dennis had passed out on the couch before having properly removed his makeup or performing any of the steps to his nightly routine, inviting hordes of bacteria to breed and wreak havoc upon his delicate complexion.

All of the events of the last night were to blame for this morning.  Also: the sun pouring through the window and shooting like a knife into his skull, the horribly unflattering fluorescent lighting that his tasteless sister had installed in here, and her stupid warped mirror that distorted his features, making his face unrecognizable to him.

For the face that looked back at him wasn’t the one that he usually saw. It was the face of an aged man, pallid and drawn.  Distinct hollows could be seen under the cheeks and clinging in gray half moons under the eyes, which were tense and bloodshot.  Long, disheveled brown hair hung in greasy locks over the forehead.  The skin had a sweaty, unhealthy look only intensified by the smears of foundation and eye makeup mottling it.  And was that...a wrinkle?

Suddenly, Dennis was ejected from his body as the world around him crumbled.  Amid the rubble, he heard a wild, almost animalistic scream, followed by ragged sobbing noises.  He saw through a blur a pile of glass shards littering the white bathroom tile, along with small dots of blood.

Then Dennis was back inside himself, although it didn’t feel right.  His skin itched and crawled as if inflamed, his muscles stretched taut to the point that they felt like they were about to burst.  His heart hammered against his chest, and his whole body thrummed with this weird electricity, as if battery acid had been poured into his veins.  For some reason, he was having trouble breathing.  For some reason, there were tears stinging his cheeks and blood flowing from his fist.  He opened it, revealing several pieces of glass embedded in the palm.

Dennis looked up at the mirror and something inside him loosened, fell away.  The mirror was entirely wrecked, revealing nothing of his reflection.  He had disappeared.  A surge of giddiness swelled up inside him  and he laughed, a crazy, hysterical laugh that he immediately found unsettling.  “Keep it cool, Dennis,” he warned himself.  Sighed. “It’s fine it’s fine it’s fine.” Then, vitriol bubbling up to the surface (why should  _ he  _ have to restrain his righteous anger, goddamn it?) he ground his teeth and snarled, “Fuck you, savages.  I am a legend.” Winced.  “Stop it, come on now.”  He closed his eyes and counted to ten, squeezing his wounded hand so that the sharp pain radiated up his arm, grounding him.  The blood dripping from it was almost soothing.

When Dee burst into the room, a jumble of flailing limbs and high-pitched squawking, he barely registered her screams. “...Do to my fucking mirror?” he caught, then, “Ohmygod Den, what the shit have you done to your hand?” He tried to tell her it was no big deal, move past it, but when he spoke his voice came out all strange and slo-mo, a total monotone.  A distressed look contorted his sister’s features.  It was a look he rarely saw on Dee’s face, one of concern and near...tenderness?...which surprised him enough that he didn’t fight her when she lowered him onto the toilet seat and ordered him, “Sit still, you goddamn lunatic.”  She rummaged through the medicine cabinet above the sink, pulling out a pair of tweezers and a first aid kit.  Dennis sat still as she went to work on him, neither of the two speaking as she prodded and pulled gingerly with the tweezers.

When the final shard of glass was out, Dee walked Dennis to the sink and ran his hand under the faucet, her fingers soothingly massaging soap over his cuts, then rinsing, Dennis watching as the water turned pink.  After patting his hand dry with a towel, she applied a  layer of antibiotic ointment and wrapped it in gauze.  Dennis felt his mouth open, twitching with the need to redeem himself, the complicated web of self-delusions he’d constructed over the years working to weave another array of rationalizations.  It wasn’t my fault, the lighting was shitty, the sun was too goddamn bright, it was a garbage mirror anyway.  But he didn’t say any of that. Instead, the words he ended up saying were “Thank you, sis.”

In response, Dee broke into a glowing smile.  


End file.
